I'm Wiki Crazy. Everyone knows that.

For those that don't know what a wiki is (which rock have you been living under) Wikipedia will explain all.

So now, it is time to review some wiki software: DokuWiki. I've installed some wikis in my time. Some of them were okay, some of them were good, and lots of them were CRAP. Until I met DokuWiki, MediaWiki (the software that runs Wikipedia) was my all time favourite.

Was.

DokuWiki however is overtaking MediaWiki. DokuWiki is like MediaWikis faster cuter cousin. Installation isn't too difficult at all. About the hardest thing you need to do is make a few directories webserver writable.

The reason why a wiki does its thing so well is that it takes simple text, and transforms it into HTML, which, if you don't know, is the stuff that makes the web go.

Basically it lets you turn something like this:

== A big Title
This is some normal, **bold**, //italic// text

into this:

A big Title

This is some normal, bold, italic text

This conversion from somewhat normal text into the cryptic goblety-gook of HTML is what makes a wiki so good. This somewhat-normal-text is called "Wiki Markup" Hell, I know HTML like the back of me hand, but I still prefer using good Wiki Markup instead. DokuWiki has absolutely excellent wiki markup. It is simple enough to use, but is remarkably effective.

DokuWiki also has a good selection of plugins to extend what kind of syntax you can have in your wiki. This goes from the simple (plugins for displaying the date according to the users region) to the massively complex (a blog plugin, so that you can use your wiki like a blog). Programmers can easily write their own plugins, and the plugin API is pretty well designed.

There is also the option of adding different media types to DokuWiki, such as images, PDFs, and pretty much anything else you could imagine. This setup doesn't seem as powerful as MediaWiki's handling of ... well... media, but it is easy to use and elegant.

And unlike lots of other PHP projects, the directory structure is laid out properly. For most people this really isn't an issue, but as a programmer I respect the level of organization and detail. Another big plus is that it uses the PHP native templating engine. Which is to say, the writers of the software use PHP the way it is designed to be used, instead of writing (or using) massively complex parsing engines to display some HTML.

The code quality of DokuWiki is good. The code is done up so that there is no newline between braces, which I find annoying, but that is just a question of style. The code itself is well commented, both for each function and inline. I think that the variable names and function names could be a little clearer, and a little more modular, but the programmer at least knows what refactoring is.

So the verdict is... if you need a wiki installed, DokuWiki is the one.

Update: I linked up Dokuwiki. Duh. I also added my own wiki at wiki.jonnay.net.